It is oddly fitting, if immensely awful, that at midnight on the 9th of February 1994, Ghérasim Luca, who had a predilection for occult numerology, took his life by the same means as had his friend Paul Celan in 1970 and his countryman Ilarie Voronca in 1946: all three men, expatriate Romanian poets long marooned in Paris, threw themselves into the Seine a perfect twenty-four years apart from one another. Luca, at 80, had just been evicted from his apartment; unlike Celan, he had long resisted attaining French citizenship and was living in the country without papers. In a note left to his wife Micheline Catti, Luca bemoaned ‘this world in which poets no longer have a place,' and if this wasn’t exactly an uncommon complaint from the étran-juif (a neologistic self-designation of Luca’s, foreigner-Jew), neither was it an unfounded one; for the perennial outsider, caught amidst the storm of nationalisms and totalitarian ideologies that characterized the European 20th century, had indeed lived a life of almost constant and relentless displacement.

A Jew and socialist before the Second World War, Luca was denied freedom of expression in his homeland’s darkening cultural atmosphere--members of government were not amused, for example, by their reception of several erotic poems by Luca in 1933, an offense for which he received a relatively lax nine day jail sentence--and threatened more seriously by Romania’s increasingly anti-Semitic fascist rule. Having survived the Iron Guard, he had then to sustain his nation’s 1947 slide into the post-war ignominy of totalitarian Communism. Seeking an end to the militaristic nightmare--attempting and failing to escape his home country in 1949--he finally succeeded in emigrating to Israel three years later, but was hounded by the army there for fleeing his refuge nation’s mandatory conscription. In France, where he lived out the rest of his life, he was often destitute, furnishing his surrealist pieces with the relentlessly dour worldview afforded him by decades of a quasi-homelessness which then, in 1994, was finally made official.

It is impossible to read, much less to translate Luca’s poetry without detecting the ever-present dimension of this persecution and alienation. His language, even if couched handily within the willfully shocking French surrealist tradition, is rife with gruesome imagery and scenes of violence. However the truest illustration of Luca’s singular poetic vision--and the one that’s earned him his reputation for being ‘untranslatable’--is the violence he does to language itself; Luca, writing in a French tongue which, despite its long-held status as lingua franca among European intellectuals, was fundamentally not his own, toyed with words in a deliberate and methodical, even clinical way. Puns are everywhere in his work; often they dictate a given poem’s entire construction.

On an immediate symbolic level, this constant linguistic subversion was a conscious strategy designed to constitute a tacit assault on prevailing nationalist notions, as well as a means for prompting in the reader that dissociation of signification so crucial to the surrealist impulse. On a human level, it was the inherent language of the alien, the provincial Eastern European, the stateless drifter, the parler apatride of the étran-juif. Luca, whose early French phrasings have been faulted for their stiffness, wrote poetry from a place of eternal remoteness, outside the comfortable and insular realm of his Western European peers, and his words are thus divorced thoroughly from even the notion of exact meaning; his every turn of phrase eludes circumscription. This severing of definitions is, of course, a key component of the surrealist experiment, and it is not one at which Luca arrived lightly, nor, probably, by choice. For though the touchstones of his art were the same ones that informed European surrealism at large--Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, occult traditions, and the horror of 20th century militarism, to name but a few--Luca’s distinctive deconstructed language imbues them with a transcendent vitality, a stylistic perspective whose limitless possibilities are afforded only by its position at the farthest of cultural margins, where it resides in stammering outrage alongside its displaced author.

Luca’s word-drunk poetry, grounded simultaneously in philosophy (as evidenced by his many theoretical treatises) and in simple happenstance of birth, constitutes an unprecedented consummation of what he characterizes in one such treatise, 1941’s “The Objectively Offered Object,” as the surrealist movement’s raison d’être: “a new objective possibility for resolving dialectically the conflict between interior and exterior worlds.” While Luca is here speaking of the sorts of ‘Symbolically Functioning Objects’ popularized by Dalí in the French Surrealist Group’s journal Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution--in which outwardly meaningless constructions of everyday objects were rigorously psychoanalyzed along fashionably Freudian lines-- he may as well be speaking about his wordplay. It was, in fact, through writing and constructing such ‘Objectively Offered Objects’ in his early surrealist texts that Luca began to explore the ego/id dialectic that he’d soon impose upon his own form, crafting poetic paradoxes (‘void voided of its void is full / void filled with its void is void’) whose external symbolic content was to be furnished only by the interior logic (more accurately desire, for the eroticism-preoccupied surrealist) of the reader and the physical sonority of the words themselves: “In visual language which serves to designate objects [to assign meaning], a word has but one sense, or two, and it holds its sonority prisoner... once this fixed form is broken, new relationships appear: sonority is exalted, secrets emerge from their slumber, the listener is introduced into a world of vibrations which demands physical participation along with mental adherence.”

Here the unhappy circumstances of Luca’s life probably intervened in the theoretical framework: this hidden realm of meaningless sound, this gateway to the unconscious, was, after all, likely more easily accessible for the polyglot Luca, for whom languages--Romanian, Yiddish, German, French--were readily interchanged depending on what must have seemed to be rather arbitrary outside circumstances (such as the brutal Iron Guard’s effort to eradicate Yiddish from Bucharest). Senselessness, in the senseless Romanian 1930s and ‘40s, was easy to come by; the admitted ‘persecution mania’ from which Luca often claimed to suffer might be more aptly described as perfect honesty about the miserable state of his world.

These nightmarish circumstances thus lend a certain extreme dimension to Luca’s poetic experiments; far from bawdy punning for its own sake, Luca’s distortions of language display what at times amounts to a genuine hatred of society--of the uniformity sought by idiotic nationalists, the mechanization and militarization of European politics, the complacency of societal authorities. Le Vampire Passif (The Passive Vampire), first published in 1941 Bucharest (Luca, living for a time in Paris, where he met and began moving in the same circles as André Breton and his French Surrealists, was forced back to Romania by the outbreak of war), is filled with heartbreaking invective: “Only in my moments of deepest depression do I realize that in that world of swine into which I was born,” Luca despairs, “I shall be forced to die, just as out in the street I’m obliged to rub shoulders with priests and cops.” Later, furnishing his refusal to serve society’s meaning-limiting uniformitarian impulse by invoking the reliably shocking trappings of the occult (‘poeticized Satanism’), he writes, “I sign a pact with Satan in my own blood... [that] will lend the century in which I have had the misfortune to be born something of the dazzling obscurity of past centuries, something of the pearlescent pallor of the centuries to come.” The present, meanwhile, is consigned irrevocably to the realm of misery--a misery whose single meaning is affixed and held firmly in place by a society of malevolent uniformity.

But all was not hopelessness and extremism. Indeed, the politics of Luca and his short-lived postwar Romanian Surrealists Group, while certainly radical, nonetheless emphasized a confidently positive revolutionary impulse long after that same spark had left the movement’s French contingent (particularly its leader and sometime-sponsor of Luca’s, Breton, for whom, in the wake of the Second World War, revolutionary surrealism figured increasingly as a failed experiment). Again we can detect in the Romanian Surrealists’ call to ‘eroticize the proletariat’ a delicate interplay of more generalized surrealist themes (namely a blend of Marxist and psychoanalytic jargon) with the distinct character of the marginalized Eastern European--as if, in the brief interim between the end of the war and the 1947 Communist takeover (which would, it should be noted, crush both these idealisms and the spirit of their authors) it might still be possible to dialectically undermine the repressive European power structure by giving free symbolic rein to the desiring unconscious mind. It is no coincidence that this period saw a renewal of Luca’s creative impulse and a burst of manic prolificacy; many of his most revered poems were written from this hopeful vantage point, the eye of the totalitarian storm, in which he synthesized his vision of surrealism as the desire-invoking ‘exercice hallucinatoire au service de la révolution.'

Until Luca’s last writings, in fact, he maintained this belief in the ferocity--and thus, revolutionary viability--of internal desire, consistently holding up the id, that zone of wild deviation from the mores of waking life, as the means by which the subjugated may free their oppressed symbolic conceptions. For all its ubiquity in Luca’s work, however, this is also a fittingly paradoxical conceit; after all, the single indispensable component to this liberty-proffering revolutionary unconscious is its quality of terror. An inversion of the institutional horror that had always afflicted the étran-juif, this inherent state (variously characterized throughout Luca’s oeuvre as ‘infernal’ and ‘Satanic’) was for Luca a cacophony of desires powerful enough that, if instrumentalized through art, it might not fail in undermining the entire oppressive symbolic order in art. Nor would this ferocious internal rewriting of symbols be confined to the realm of the page or gallery. Indeed, in his calls for unleashing the violent unconscious on the sociocultural realm Luca is advocating no less than a complete takeover of the system of imposed, commodified meaning--the very concrete stuff of culturally-dictated emotion: “The nature of the flowers one gives, which change in florists’ windows and lovers’ arms according to the seasons, offers us nothing... the artificial flowers carried artificially in a lover’s arms are laid at the feet of the beloved so that the artificial society in which we live might prolong its death throes.” The enemy, forever in Luca’s sights, is that hierarchical authority which seeks to delineate the meaning--and so delimit the revolutionary potential--of the population by fixing meanings to an unthreatening uniform constant. To ‘eroticize the proletariat,’ then, is to widen the conditional space of a symbol enough to let in a modicum of lurking, barbarous desire--even if this widening is afforded only by a choice pun. It is this effort, I believe, which best characterizes the whole of Luca’s writings--which justifies the messy ‘delirium of interpretation’ into which he forces the reader.

And it is quite messy, quite often: in many of Luca’s works, particularly his earlier prose/philosophy/poetry hybrids such as The Passive Vampire and The Inventor of Love, the reader is bombarded with digressive forays into the author’s elaborate idiosyncratic belief system, somewhere between the fashions of the European avant garde and a broodingly personal outsider status. Broadly stated, there are Freudian considerations (the exploration of the Objectively Offered Object is, because non-heirarchical, also non-Oedipal, a definition that would inform to a great extent the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, who are probably the most vocal of the poet’s few cultural champions) and, while comprising largely the sort of idealization of the dream state that underpinned the work of Dalí and other early surrealists, these ideas frequently dip deeper into the occult--as well as a sort of cursory Kabbalism, Satanism, even alchemy--than did those of Luca’s Western European peers. Luca’s ideas were complex and multivalent as they get, and their divergent elements he synthesized into a distinct and ever-present brand of nature worship predicated, in reliably Lucan extremeness, on the eroticization of plants.

If this would seem to fall outside of Luca’s Marxist purview--as how can meanings of natural objects really be heirarchically enforced? isn’t he the only one doing the symbol-imposing?--we would argue that it represents instead an extension of Luca’s assault on complacency, one for which he was willing to fudge a bit his diversity-touting ideals: a necessary lashing-out on the part of the étran-juif. If the oppressive power structure is to be undermined by the violence of the psyche, nature is best conceived of not as a collection of Objectively Offered Objects, but rather as the manifestation of that unconscious realm itself; the objective correlative of rabid desire. If this symmetry of meaning--this easy symbolism--is definitely a little un-Lucalike, it is a forgivable and perhaps necessary concession to the reader meant to be aroused by the notion of “a fantastic flora, virgin and demented, the faithful image of that terrible fauna from the heart of our being.”

We see then that Luca aimed, from his distant mooring on the margins of enfranchisement, to guide the reader, to teach. Transmuting the unique complexities of his personality, his interests, and his statuses--national, political, temporal, cultural, religious--into a calculus by whose application one could unlock the possibilities of the unconscious mind, he asserted a manically zealous opposition to the senseless cruelties of 20th century life, sacrificing much--eventually, on the banks of the Seine, sacrificing all. However, for all the stringency of his elaborately-conceived artistic ideology, for all his vitriol, Luca was not above surrendering to the superiority of unchained human emotion--ineffable, and yes, untranslatable--over even the cruelest and most senseless of external circumstances, as when he describes in The Passive Vampire a brief window of internal happiness in militarized 1941 Romania, wherein one can almost imagine the Iron Guard marching the Bucharest streets to which he had been so unhappily consigned: “The nine days of love during which my freedom had exceeded even the hopes I placed in poetry and revolution, a limitless, total, infernal freedom, seem to me the mirror reverse of the nine days I had spent in prison nine years earlier because of love, because of my poems about love that my contemporaries had cited in their legal briefs as a case of the assault on common decency.”

With an eye toward all of these considerations and thematic colorations in Luca’s oeuvre--his impulsive desirous push for semiotic disentanglement, relentless but for the times it is superseded by the notion of nature as the overpowering manifestation of that same desire; his politics’ delineation of all popularly-derived meanings as non-viably hierarchical except when they are superseded by love--we undertook the following translations without much concern for imposition, for any wrongheaded finality our work may appear to proffer. Immersing ourselves in Luca, it became clear that finality itself never figured in his efforts, that as ideology couldn’t wholly account for the mysteries of meaning that afflict the individual, neither could a rigorous and uniform poetic interpretation hope to explain or codify them. What’s more, it became clear that Luca did not and would not care a whit; that the stammering poetic language--belonging more to him than to France or any nation--effectively transcended the delineations of language.

Our efforts were thus directed toward a translation rooted in the theoretical and historical bases of surrealism--and a feeling for when Luca would’ve eschewed them. The originals typify the Luca focus on raw desire in nature’s guise (“La proie s’ombre”), merciless mockery of official language and secret keeping (“Le nerf de boeuf”), and the process of codifying an objectively offered event or object (“Vers le non-mental,” “Madeleine”). They also typify the shagginess and apparent impenetrability of this phase of Luca’s work (it is to these sorts of pieces that the ‘untranslatable’ label tends to be affixed), but in the task of translating--that is, in our having no choice but to translate--a thoroughly different quality emerged, and did so across the source and target languages, effectively in between French and English. The small semiotic cells Luca uses--a glass of water, a nerve cell--find in their English versions not an exact equivalence but a means by which the negative semiotic space surrounding the pair can be brought into focus. This space, with the myriad potential meanings that live there, is the zone of semiotic unhinging where Luca’s poetry is meant to transport the reader--as in the oldest meaning-obviating trick in the book, wherein a word repeated over and over reliably loses its meaning and becomes pure sound (“Crimes sans initiale,” the last of the appended poems, is an exercise in just this practice which effectively needs no translation; indeed, we have left it mostly untouched). To translate the untranslatable, then, with all the sloppy inexactitude with which the meanings of the originals are brought into focus, is a continuation of the surrealist work in paradox, simultaneously pointing to its impossibility and continuing on, doing so without relent or logic but only that ravenous desire; it is an outgrowth of the insatiable quest to affect a verifiably equitable and just motherless tongue.

La proie s'ombre / Shadow preying

At the edge of a forest
whose trees are ideas let fly
whose each leaf ’s a thought through to bark

the vegetative reveals us

to be the cursed bottom rung of an animal sect

or more precisely
the age-old dread of an insect
who awakes a man
the only way--

the only fundamental weapon--
to animate a man mentally
which is to say mantally

as a mantis

this would only mark
with a dry laugh of alarm
the devouring word--
Entity and antithesis of the bush
a brush, organic and savage--

boring into this man’s head
telling him of the parks and greenhouse heresy
that just ravages

like a key’s orgasm
a gateway to glory

Thus is the legendary passivity
the famous and ample passivity of plants
molted here in idle hatred

in insane rage
in sex in defiance in free-for-all

lured by the sap by the blood by the soak...
and as quick as the passage of woman
into wildcat
it saps our filthy ancestral wound

which, fountain spewing, drains us
of these crocodile tears
and these fake death rattles which catheterize
which oblige us our serene gazes burialward

yet only terror
is still capable of inserting
into the ceaseless tropism of body and
shameful spirit

this double-echoed prism

wherein the brain and the senses soak up
the violent innocence
of a flora and a fauna
whose honeymoon is a long abduction

a violent conduction
a conned violation
slow as gold and leaden cruelty

And it’s from around this mental equator
in the space delimited by the tropics
of the head latitude
and the angle of the eye
that the myth of a species from the utopian jungle
emerges in the world
a species as virginal as the unknowable
or the other “face” of the moon
never within reach of rifle
or axe

its prey is the snow

hammering sandtraps in some game of marbles
lit by the diffuse breath
of a dream

For twining upward
in enormous tendrilled keys
the lianas
the branches the furnaces and the rituals

fuse

around the forms placed
miraculously
at the crossing of dryads
druids and man

Such focal points
as these yeses and nos
outside of time
outside place and outside matter

choose the coupling
of oasis and hamlet

that descends among these gods
through to the underside of the ages
the gods-site-beast-isle-ash-fire

that leaves like the encoupling of bird
and branch

and that the exiles from the center
the shadow of the golden foliage
will one day worship
between the walls of their shadowsunk cities
..........................................................

Vers le non-mental / To the non-mental

Worming down to earth beneath a high heel
A thought turns
round itself
with a static frenzy
comparable to a worm
pinned under a high heel
in turn comparable to a thought
which while turning round itself
returns to itself
with a static frenzy
yet comparable

While turning
not tablelike
or at least not yet
Thought returns to itself
with a static frenzy

comparable to a worm
under a high heel
and not to a teacup
on a turning table

It turns round
a worm
who turns
round a body
who turns back to the worm
and the turning earth
Thus not yet like
a table
A thought is thus not yet
comparable to a shadow
turning round
a turning table
To the table turning round a head
Nor to the shadow
of a head
turning round the turning
at the head of the table

It is thus not comparable
to a shadow
Nor to a teacup
on the table turning round a head
Nor to the turning frenzy
of a teacup
atop the head

It denies the turning truth
of the earth

Its frenzy of shadow
The teacupful of shadow on the shadow of
a table turning round a shadow
of a head all together
It’s thus not comparable
to the tempest

Neither to the tempest
in a teacup
nor to the teacupful of rain

But rather to the static frenzy
of the shadow of a doubt

which turns still in its brain
taking a turn for the worse
like all that turns
round good and bad
with a headache comparable
to the static frenzy of
a thought comparable to the incomparable

Madeleine

her right hand passes
under her left elbow
a side of her face hides
in her left hand’s side

her left hand passes
under her right elbow
the other side of her face hides
in her right hand’s side

her right hand withdraws
from her left elbow
her left hand withdraws
from her right elbow
her face hides
inside her hands

with the right hand
for the other was misplaced
with the left hand
for the other was erased

with misplaced hand
under armless elbow
with erased hand
under elbowless arm

with neither hand nor face
arm-in-arm
Madeleine hides Madeleine

Le nerf du boeuf / The bullwhip nerve

The Bullwhip Nerve is the source
of some information
that has recently circulated
with regard to surveys
carried out by the Brain
near certain nerves of the stem
on what their reactions
might be
in the eventuality
of a premeditated attack
against the Skeleton
bony bodily frame
of man and animal
death
is often depicted
in the guise of a skeleton

The Sacral Plexus
web of nervy nets
interlaced and tangled up
specifies that
it’s the Bullwhip Nerve itself
posterior cervical ligament
of ox and horse
dried up and rounded off by industry
that has confidentially passed along
this information
to some networks
during one free-flowing soirée

The Sacral Plexus
having not been invited
was not considered to be
bound to secrecy

According to the same Plexus
the sustained Nerve Pinch
received by a horse
on the tendon
of the posterior part
of its front leg
would be very irritated
by this initiative
and would busy itself attenuating
the repercussions
on the nervous System

It would determine that such business
risked compromising
its position of strict neutrality
in the brain-skeleton conflict

That said
it rather seems
that on the bony side
they deal with
quite similar
bits of data

For the moment
the majority of Systems
still hesitate to believe
in the possibility of a war
between the soft and fatty substance
contained in the interior of the bones
and the mass of nervous matter
that occupies the vertebrate’s skull